[GOAL] Re: Dreadful Daily Mail article on Open Access

[Stevan Harnad]

On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 2:47 PM, Eric F. Van de Velde

When replacing a high-margin industry with a low-margin one, when
> increasing efficiency in the distribution by going open access, there will
> be job losses and job substitutions in the whole pipeline of information
> delivery. These costs of Open access do not invalidate the goals and the
> value of open access...
>

> How this evolution was supposed to happen was always a bit foggy....
>

> Open access will destroy jobs initially, but it will also create jobs by
> making access to research free, which is particularly significant for
> start-up ventures. It may also lower the cost of education or, at least,
> help tame the educational rate of inflation...


We can speculate about the transition from the subscription model for
recovering the costs of publication to the Gold OA model for recovering the
(down-sized) costs of post-Green-OA publication.

But that is not what is at issue here. What is at issue here is an attempt
to halt or marginalize Green OA mandates on the grounds that they may
eventually cause the subscription model to become unsustainable.

There's nothing wrong with speculating about and even planning for the
hypothetical transition.

But there's everything wrong with trying to stop it from happening.

Nor are the only interests involved, or the most important ones, those of a
"high-margin industry [transitioning into] a low-margin one" (i.e., the
publication industry).

Far higher-stake players are the public research funding system, the
university research system, the vast R&D industry, research itself, and the
tax-paying public, who, to repeat, are not funding research to keep a
high-margin industry from downsizing to a low-margin industry by denying
research the open access that the online medium and technology have made
possible.

If the Finch Report had recommended, as it should have: "Full speed ahead
with extending and strengthening Green OA mandates in the UK and wordlwide
-- and then lets plan on the transition from the subscription model for
recovering the costs of publication to the Gold OA model for recovering the
(down-sized) costs of post-Green-OA publication if and when Green OA makes
subscriptions unsustainable" no one would have had the slightest objection.

But that's not at all what the Finch Report recommended. It declared Green
OA a failure that would have threatened the survival of the publishing
industry and it recommended instead a slow (foggy) evolution by spending
money pre-emptively on Gold OA (even though subscriptions are still paying
the bill in full) rather than on planning for "replacing a high-margin
industry with a low-margin one."

Indeed, in eliminating Green OA, the Report would eliminate the very factor
that would see to it not only that the research community soon has the OA
it needs, at long last, but the factor that would see to it that publishing
eventually downsizes from the high-margin industry it now is, to the
low-margin one it will be, post-Green-OA.

So keep pursuing gold-dust, and forget about both OA and downsizing?

No, OA is not primarily about the economics of publishing, it is about the
pragmatics of research practice and progress in the online era. I called it
the tail in my prior metaphor, but publishing is more like the flea on the
tail of the vast, global R&D dog.

How long will it continue to be allowed to block the optimal and inevitable
for everyone else?

Stevan Harnad
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